I have to confess that I’m not the world’s
greatest fan of the works of L S Lowry, which I tend to find tedious and
repetitive when viewed in bulk- all these grim northern townscapes with joyless
crowds scurrying to and fro under a leaden sky (surely by the law of averages
the sun must have shone once or twice in Salford during his long life….). Perhaps it doesn’t help that he’s become a
kind of visual cliché, endlessly recycled on the covers of books with even the
most tenuous relationship to industrial England in the first half of last
century. So I hadn’t actually planned
to go to the Tate Britain show of his work- except that the exhibition I did
intend to go to (one on fashion and art in Tudor and Stuart England in the Buckingham
Palace gallery) turned out to be booked solid on the day I turned up and I
didn’t want to waste the journey into London.
I’m not sure I emerged a greater enthusiast
for his paintings but I certainly came to a greater appreciation of the
complexity of the man and his work. For
one thing, it came as a faint shock to discover that his “matchstick men”
really were a conscious aesthetic choice.
As some of the graphic works in the show demonstrated, he was a
competent if uninspired draftsman of the human body (though he did tend turn
faces into something faintly cartoonish- if he’d grown up in France or Belgium
one could imagine him becoming a
successful strip canton designer). It
was also fascinating to see just how far he seems to have contributed to his
own myth.
It’s very easy to slip into thinking of him
as a self-taught eccentric, a spare time painter with a day job- a kind of
English Douanier Rousseau with a much less lurid imagination, consciously
marginal to a British art scene which patronised him when it bothered noticing
his existence at all. In fact he had a
thorough formal artistic education, mostly from Adolphe Valette, a thoroughly
competent second division Impressionist who made a career teaching art in Manchester in the early
years of the twentieth century. Some of
Valette’s works were in the show and it was interesting to see how he responded
to the same surroundings- in his depiction Manchester became a city of twilights and
autumnal mists with edge of slightly sinister romanticism, dark satanic mills
looming like castles in the gloom- see below
Lowry clearly had his ups and downs with Valette and certainly didn’t paint
like him (then again he didn't paint much the Pre-Raphaelites, whom he admired). He never formally graduated from art school but he was most assuredly
not self taught or amateurish. Nor was
he particularly marginal. In the late
1920’s-early 1930’s he was contributing regularly to exhibitions of
contemporary art in Paris,
gathering favourable critical views and sales.
Indeed around 1930 he was probably better known in France than
many “bigger” names in British art. He
was never short of commissions and became enough part of the British art
establishment to be elected to the Royal
Academy. He would have had his knighthood too
(offered in a splendid piece of trans-Pennine ecumenism by that professional Yorkshireman
Harold Wilson, probably unaware of Lowry’s staunchly Tory politics) except that
he refused it, as he refused all honours on principle. He also turned down job offers from the
then-“Manchester Guardian”, which wanted him to serve as the paper’s art
critic. His work even figured on
postage stamps during his lifetime.
While it’s true to say that not everybody was happy with this, the
hostility appears to have been prompted by a feeling that putting Lowry’s grim
industrial scenes on display world wide did nothing for the image of the UK
rather than contempt for the artist’s professional competence- I wonder how the
critic in question would have responded if he’d known that the Lowry which the
Government commissioned in the 1960’s ended up in the British Embassy in Moscow
during the Brezhnev era…. This isn’t
quite what the myth of the northern painter of the Common Man spurned by a
snobbish metropolitan art establishment would suggest.
This isn’t to say that Lowry didn’t potentially
have issues with that establishment.
His politics were a bit problematic for a mostly left-leaning artistic
world. His employment as a rent
collector was potentially even more of an issue and perhaps helps to explain
why Lowry was notoriously evasive and unreliable over details of his
biography. By all accounts he was good
at his job and popular with his “clients”; rent collectors were in practice
rarely the hated and hateful figures of romantic middle class leftist
demonology. They may not have been part
of the community they worked in but they needed to know its ins and outs very
well indeed if they were going to do their job effectively. One gets a sense of that slightly distanced
understanding in Lowry’s art.
He never gives
a sense of belonging to the world that he paints but he knows its codes and
concerns and pleasures; the fever van taking a diphtheria sufferer on what was usually
a one way trip to hospital (with the consequence that the family’s goods and
possessions might well be impounded or even destroyed), punch ups in the streets,
demonstrations, funfairs and football matches (Lowry was a football enthusiast
but he doesn’t seem to be part of the crowd watched as its members head to the
stadium).
He was
an outsider, of course, though the economic distance between him and the better
off part of his clientele probably wasn’t enormous (socially matters were
rather different in the England
of the 1920’s and 30’s with its minutely calibrated social hierarchies). His family were rather precariously lower
middle class. His mother, to whom he was
very close, was musically talented and narrowly missed out on a career as a
concert pianist. His father was an
insurance company clerk. The family’s
financial circumstances deteriorated during Lowry’s childhood and they had to
move into a barely respectable district only just a cut above the slums where
he collected his rents. One can
speculate on how that insecurity may have affected him. It may well have persuaded him to go on with
the rent collecting (a nice secure job) rather than risking becoming a full
time artist or even a newspaper art critic for a paper whose overall political
line he probably didn’t greatly relish. It didn’t give him the embittered hatred of
the working classes which often afflicted people with his background; he was a
high Tory, not a Fascist, and prepared to see the good in people whose politics
he didn’t share. He was, for instance,
supportive of the National Health Service when that was largely decried on the
right, but never bought into the slightly millennial rhetoric which surrounded
much of the Attlee Government’s social policy, suggesting that the people he
dealt with weren’t really any happier as a result.
The sense of personal remoteness and
detachment in his work goes even wider, though. This emerged in the works he painted during
and immediately after the Second World War. Although he was appointed an official War
Artist and did his bit as an Air Raid Warden and Fire Watcher one doesn’t have
the sense of personal solidarity with the wider national struggle which emerges
from, say, Stanley Spencer’s paintings and drawings of workers in the Clydeside
shipyards. Uniforms are surprisingly
thin on the ground in his depiction of VE day celebrations, and the joy seems a bit restrained, even in the pub.
One of his rare works focused on people
(rather than people set in and somewhat dwarfed by the industrial environment)
was a cruelly Otto Dix-like depiction of disabled men (presumably war victims,
judging from the date), which occasioned some negative comment when it was
painted. There are complexities here
which weren’t really explored by the show.
Nor did really get into the oddly static
and timeless nature of Lowry’s work. As
seems to be the wont of the current Tate Britain management, he was fitted
into a discourse of modernism. This is
a bit odd; his artistic training might have looked radical in certain British
contexts but Valette was hardly cutting edge by French standards. I suppose it was his subject matter which
sees him cast as a painter of modern urban life. In a way this is fair enough- but Lancashire
in the 1920’s and 1930’s wasn’t exactly the new world which it appeared in the
days when Engels knew the city (and went foxhunting in the countryside, though
strangely he never appeared in hunting pink in any of the depictions of him in Red Square during the Communist era….). Even in Lowry’s youth it was already a bit
backward looking, not quite the industrial museum it had become by the 1950’s
and 1960’s but beginning to struggle in a world powered by electricity rather
than steam where other parts of the world were increasingly able to produce
textiles at competitive prices. A
genuine painter of modernity in, say, 1935 would have been depicting the new
light industries somewhere like Slough or the nascent suburbia inhabited by
Richmal Crompton’s William Brown. To the
extent that Lowry ever painted a simple vision of the world that he saw around
him (and I don’t for one moment think he did), it was a melancholy depiction of
a region which didn’t just have serious social problems in its own time but was
also increasingly failing to come to terms with a changing world.
It is noticeable just how far the series of
large scale townscapes like the one at the top which he painted in the 1950’s elide out the changes
which would already have been visible in the world around him. Motor cars and power lines are visible but wedged awkwardly in among the rows of terraced houses,
scrubbly open spaces, polluted waterways and factory chimneys of the by then
traditional northern cityscape.
Admittedly these landscapes are rarely meant to depict anywhere specific
(and there are a few sly jokes buried away in some of the paintings which underline
their generic nature) but they contain remarkably little visible recognition of
the changes afoot when they were being painted. Slum clearance had begun even before 1939
but became a major preoccupation of post war governments, both at national and
local level. New theories of urban
development were given considerable play, not always with happy results. Lowry’s native Salford
apparently had one of the highest levels of demolition and rebuilding of any
English city. None of this is visible in
Lowry’s work, which remains resolutely fixed in the 1930’s at the latest (it
is, incidentally, intriguing that several of his later large scale works
involve depictions of mining villages in South Wales, which almost certainly
saw a lot less modernisation than the urban north of England in this period- see below). Lowry admitted as much in interviews and I
suspect it accounts for a large part of his popularity. One hears a lot about rural nostalgia as a
factor shaping appreciation of certain British artists (rarely seen as a
positive) but Lowry seems to have become increasingly an artist of urban nostalgia,
appreciated (perhaps slightly guiltily) by the upwardly socially mobile
children and grandchildren of the matchstick men and woman in his paintings for
whom the urban past represents a kind of authenticity. I suspect the old Tory would be rather
amused.
